Moves to reassure air travellers after al-Qaida bomb plot foiled

The reassurance that passengers would not be subjected to further scrutiny came from congressional and security officials in Washington after the CIA disclosed that they had carried out a covert operation in Yemen to disrupt the latest plot.

Officials yesterday revealed that agents had had help from a well-placed informant and foreign intelligence leading them to find the latest bomb.

They said the device represented a more sophisticated version of the underwear bomb that failed to detonate aboard a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

Yesterday, FBI experts were picking apart the non-metallic device and its refined detonation system to see if it could have evaded security measures to bring down a plane.

US airports will continue to require passengers to remove their shoes, be frisked or go through body scanners, said officials, adding that the measures were strong enough not to need tightening immediately.

President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said: “I think people getting on a plane today should feel confident that their intelligence services are working, day in and day out.”

Officials also revealed that by working with an informant close to al-Qaida in Yemen, the CIA had last month learned about the latest bomb plot.

The would-be bomber was supposed to buy a plane ticket to the United States and detonate the bomb inside the country, they added.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Tuesday night that she had been briefed about an “undetectable” device that was “going to be on a US-bound airliner”.

However, the CIA agents swooped before the bomber could choose a target or buy a ticket.

Commentators have remarked that the plot is a reminder of the ambitions of al-Qaida in Yemen, the most active and dangerous branch of the terrorist group. While al-Qaida’s core in Pakistan has been weakened over the past decade, instability in Yemen has allowed an offshoot group to thrive and set up training camps there.

In some parts of the country, al-Qaida has become the de facto government.

Though analysis of the device was yesterday incomplete, security officials said they remained confident in the security systems currently in place at US airports.

“These layers include threat and vulnerability analysis, pre-screening and screening of passengers, using the best available technology, random searches at airports, federal air marshal coverage and additional security measures both seen and unseen,” said a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.

“The device did not appear to pose a threat to the public air service, but the plot itself indicates that these terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people,” said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Authorities said it was not clear who built the bomb, but because of its sophistication and its similarity to the Detroit bomb, they suspected it was the work of master bomb maker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri or one of his students.

Al-Asiri constructed the first underwear bomb and two others that al-Qaida built into printer cartridges and shipped to the US on cargo planes in 2010.